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10 Dec 2016 4:58:03am

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Another great philosopher, Patrick Deneen, commenting on Milbank's convincing and foreboding arguments:

"there are many claimants to “rights” that are unlikely to find a hearing in the current configuration of an ascendant Progressive class. Among of those, interestingly, are children growing up in fatherless households, the condition of a third of children in the United States today. The media is almost entirely silent about this scandal in plain sight, one that negatively effects the life-chances of fifteen-million children. Why is it that nearly every elite institution – news station, newspaper, sit-com, talk-show, school, university, and so on – has made gay-marriage the object of its most fervent devotions, not children growing up without fathers?

What of other issues that might be on the agenda? Too big to fail? Imperial overreach? Drone strikes? Massive and growing inequality between the well-off and the working class? Yes, those are problems. But is every elite institution devoting anything comparable to similar energies to any of these issues as they are to the drumbeat of “marriage equality”?

All these other issues are just policy matters on which reasonable people can disagree. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is an extension of a 500-year agenda of remaking every social institution in the image and likeness of liberalism – the autonomous rights-bearing individual freely consenting to, and identifying primarily with, the liberal State. The family was an intractable challenge and its undefining was liberalism’s ultimate goal. Gay marriage is the political vehicle on which reproductive technologies will now be enabled to finally remake that most recalcitrant institution. The fact that every other institution has already been effectively reordered by liberalism’s logic – regions, States, neighborhoods, schools, universities, and churches – has made even the family fairly easy prey. If it weren’t happening before our eyes, it would make for a pretty good science-fiction novel."http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2013/05/biopolitical_tyranny/